Riotous fun with hilarious new take on Austen - Pride & Prejudice* (*Sort Of)

Show creator Isobel McArthur explains: “My philosophy is that there are three groups in the audience. We've got the Austenites, the card-carrying absolutely dyed in the wool Austen fans, and we have got to honour the book that they adore. And there's a degree to which we have got to prove to these people that we love the book as much as they do. There is also a second group of people, who might be school kids or aliens from outer space, who have never heard of Jane Austen and don't know a single thing about her. And we've got to make sure that they've got the story that they can hold onto and that it makes sense to them. And then there is the third group of people that think that they sort of know Pride and Prejudice in a ' Oh yes, that's Colin Firth coming out of the lake in a wet shirt’ type way or they might know the French and Saunders parody. These are people who've got a certain set of cultural markers. And we've got to make sure that they can't be wrong either. We've got to honour what Pride and Prejudice stands for them.”

Isobel’s version all began in 2018 when Andy Arnold was the artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow: “He was interested in doing a reimagined classic novel for his summer season. He's always been one of the best advocates of new graduates and their work. He is an AD that takes risks on unproven artists and that is all to his credit. He perceives creative risk as part of the process and accepts in a really admirable and generous way that some things will fail and that is also important.

“Myself and quite a few recent graduates were trying to keep our hand in since graduating and getting together and trying to work on new things, and when I heard that he was interested in a novel adaptation, I was living above a second-hand book shop in Glasgow. I went in and got a stack of 50 pence paperbacks to sit down and see what ones might be worth adapting for the Tron.

“I had never read a word of Jane Austen before. I'd always assumed, based on popular cultural baggage, that the book would be rather po-faced and concerned only with upper class people at that time in history. I was so wrong. From page one it is an incredibly funny book, and I was puzzled by how people in their adaptations in the interim have managed to kill off the humour and the fact that it is basically a romcom.

“There was a perceived notion that either Austen was not for Glasgow or Glasgow was not for Austen and I was not sure which one should be more offended by that. But there was perceived to be this cavernous gap between the two, and that’s partly why I put this on.

“And I thought that this is a book that is so concerned with manners and morals and social classes that I had to make it accessible through the servants telling the story, to have it narrated by the working-class characters and just as importantly by the working-class female characters.”

Clearly Isobel has heightened things somewhat: “But for me it is all there in the original novel. She writes these characters so brilliantly. Her understanding of people in all their ludicrousness is just perfect. She really gets the folly of human nature, and she really leans into the absurd.”